Bauer's History

 In recent years I have become more and more obsessed with AI, much like everyone else in society. In this regard I am very fascinated by two different aspects were the first is simply the implementation of AI in my own discipline of history. In this regard I can mainly see two were clearcut utilizations of artificial intelligence were the first in software such as Transkribus, which transcribes old hand-written records to modern print in a matter of minutes. Transkribus have actually become smart enough to have a 99,3 percent correctness, compared to the human 99,7 percent correctness. Even though we still have a bit to wander with transkribus it will probably change what subjects historians can dwelve into, since one of the key difficulties with older periods is the material aspect and reading of texts. Once this obstacle is overcome it would perhaps not require as much training to go into the medieval or early modern period. A second aspect of this is that AI will probably, give...

 F or the past week I have worked alot with the history of AI for an upcoming course on AI and archives which I will be part of the teaching team during the next semester. This area have been rather tricky for me as a scholar in humanities to learn about, since most of the text is rather technical and does not really have historians as a point of departure. The texts that have been written as a way to popularize are also filled with technical terms such as "neural networks" which they seem to think is rather obvious terms for scholars from all fields. Yet I have read some technical courses at the university, and this have helped alot. I have even managed to read some of Alan Turings original writing, and apart from the math I found rather interesting.  What I however have come learn during this week is actually how complex the notion of AI really is. Basically the idea of living machines have been part of western culture since ancient greece with Heifastos golden robots and f...

Following the advances in post-modernism historians have become rather aware that they do not produce neutral knowledges, but rather that the questions they ask to some degree also mirrors the questions historians ask. A clear example of this is Donna Haraways critique of the idea of "neutral" social scientists, since this idea often have taken people in academia as point of depature, thereby creating an image of the the neutral research as a middle-class male in his midforties without thinking of the limitations such as person have on what becomes possible to ask.  Given my awarness that openAI is not fully transparent of its sources, and thus neither transparent in which taken for granted assumptions that shapes it's answer (an aspect that fails to meet the standard of Tracy's good qualitative research ), I became curious on what would happened if I started to make a conversation with it with my own area of expertis as a point depature. I therefore asked OpenAI the...